To represent the old school, we chose Alfa Romeo's Spider Veloce and Fiat's Spider 2000. The Alfa is easily the most refined proponent of the top-down school you can find these days. It's the result of years of endless fine-tuning of the same package and its contents. You can accuse Alfa of stubbornly avoiding change, but give them credit for sticking with something until they got it right.

The Fiat was chosen for a couple of reasons. It's always been a good sports car, actually winning one of the Car and Driver gang-bangs a few years ago. For '79 it has a new two-liter engine and such nontraditional refinements as power windows and a chin spoiler.

To represent the new boys, the choices were obvious: the Porsche 924, the Mazda RX-7, and the Datsun 380-ZX. Datsun started this revolution in sports cars with the 240-Z and has reigned supreme ever since. At least through 1978. However, there is a pretender to the throne. Mazda's RX-7 is an obvious monkey-see, monkey-do imitation of the original Z-car philosophy, right down to the (comparatively) low-price/high-performance ratio. The Z has a big head start, so the RX-7 can never hope to catch up in sheer sales, but with the ZX so obviously heading down luxury lane, the title is not only up for grabs, it's changing hands.

The 924 was another obvious choice for this fact-finding mission. The name on the nose is probably entree enough to any gathering of sports-type cars, but the 924 was particularly right for this one. Porsches, you'll remember, have been the subject of the it's-a-sports-car-no-it-isn't argument for two decades, with such august bodies as the FIA and the SCCA alternately deciding yes they are, no they aren't, depending on which position was backed with the most political clout at rules-writing time. But regardless of the traditional arguments, the front-engined, hatchbacked, two-seats-plus-a-sorta-seat 924 is very much a part of the new wave.

Our sixth participant was included because it seemed like a good idea more than anything else. Going in, we knew the L82 Corvette was both outclassed and beneath its class in this group. No way could any of the other five hope to match the Vette's performance. A hundred more horsepower will do that for you. And also, no way could the antiquated Vette hope to be the equal of the newcomers when it comes to the advantages in ride and handling that sophisticated engineering can produce. But a Corvette is a sports car, and we'll double Sherman's annual contribution to the Police Benevolent Association if a Corvette isn't fun to drive.